Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Tuesday July 10, 2012 @07:07AM
from the magnetic-field-a-lie dept.

An anonymous reader writes about an observation that convection in the outer layer of the Sun seems not to behave how it ought to: "These new findings based on SDO imagery, if verified, would upend our understanding of how heat is transported outwards by the Sun and challenges existing explanations of the formation of sunspots, the magnetic field generation of the sun, not to mention the concept of convective mixing of light and heavy elements in the solar atmosphere. 'However, our results (PDF) suggest that convective motions in the Sun are nearly 100 times smaller than these current theoretical expectations,' continued Hanasoge, also a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Plank Institute in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany. 'These motions are indeed that slow in the Sun, then the most widely accepted theory concerning the generation of solar magnetic field is broken, leaving us with no compelling theory to explain its generation of magnetic fields and the need to overhaul our understanding of the physics of the Sun's interior.'"

We used to believe the sun was powered by gravitational potential energy, giving us 10K years or so of solar system life. Then a geologist and and astronomer were chatting one day, and the geologist asked about the age of the solar system...

As it turns out, the rocks were all older than the solar system. So they knew something was weird.

If you get results that fly in the face of decades of peer-reviewed research, your first instinct should not be to believe you've upended physics as we know it. Your first instinct should be, "Oh shit, what did I fuck up?"

If Slashdot commenters admit that data projections can be massively wrong, then they must admit that climate projections (the favorite topic around here) could be wrong.

The difference is that here, the observations contradict the projections, while with the climate the observations confirm the projections.Yearly average temperatures are climbing, species are spreading north, arctic ice is shrinking...

It's the climate "scepticists" who deny observed reality, not scientists.

Well I'm not an astrophysicist but in my admittedly poor understanding of this, they finally got around to measuring something, whereas before it was just a hypothesis. We assumed, for decades, that other planetary systems would be like ours, simply because we hadn't seen them.It doesn't need any sort of new physics. We just need a better hypothesis on what causes the Sun's magnetic field.NASA does screw up, sometimes, but it's not like some wacko in the middle of India looked at red-tinted rain and said it

If you get results that fly in the face of decades of peer-reviewed research, your first instinct should not be to believe you've upended physics as we know it. Your first instinct should be, "Oh shit, what did I fuck up?"

My money is on the "results" being wrong.

Increase the "Oh shit, what did I fuck up?" if your "results" are multiple of 2 or 10:

"What they found significantly departed from existing theory–specifically, the speed of the Sun’s plasma motions were approximately 100 times slower than scientists had previously projected."

Slashdot is linking to a climate denier's website in order to increase the hype factor. I'm sure they got plenty of submissions for this story that linked to more mainstream sites. But that would not provoke the masses. This site is morphing into HuffPo since CmdrTaco left.

Yeah, nothing say "quack" like resisting the massive power and money grab based soley on secret computer models that never seem to actually make accurate predictions. After all "the science is settled"!

Sometimes decades of peer-reviewed research is wrong. Not very often, I admit, but it is exactly to find such occasions that people do science in the first place. I don't think we should discourage researchers from reporting unorthodox findings.

Instead of making veiled accusations when someone announces an unexpected finding, the correct response is to take a careful look at it. If accusations of fraud or ineptitude are warranted, peer review will make that clear.

Of course, I wholeheartedly agree that researchers should check their work and subject it to peer review before they call a press conference. I still remember the "cold fusion" fiasco [wikipedia.org]. Like cold fusion, this result is nothing until it's passed thorough review.

Better yet, the recent faster than light neutrinos [wikipedia.org]. Anyway, don't close the door to new discoveries and major rewrites of theories because facts don't match their predictions. Discarding facts because don't match the idea we have of the world is called religion, not science.

The researches involved with that did the right things: they published a paper saying "we got these unbelievable results, help us find our error." Don't cast aspersions because of the horrific state of science reporting.

A result reached in only one reviewed paper is often next to nothing. That's why science requires repeatability. Any particular scientific paper stands a good chance of being wrong, for a number of reasons. If the paper requires a 5% probability or less of getting the results by chance alone, and most papers that get negative results are not published, then there's a higher than 10% probability that a published paper's results were obtained through chance alone -- the researchers were just lucky. Then there

There are clues to when it might go wrong. When it does, there was always some kind of questionable scientific behavior going on, like not double-checking experiments, etc. (Some of those are discussed here [columbia.edu]).

Usually it happens in fields that are harder to check, for example, neurology, where you can't dissect living people's brains to test your theory, or economics, where it's impossibly to set up a double-blind experiment of economies to see exactly how your tax cut/stimulus will affect things. In the ca

BTW, google on "iron sun" as well as "electric universe". I've been wondering if the sun is powered by LENR reactions from quantum tunnelling boundary evaporation of neutrons from a huge iron-nickel mass? The hydrogen seen on the surface of the sun may not be representative of what is below the surface, same as much of the earth is covered with water, but only a mile deep. The core of the Earth may be heated by a similar boudnary ev

Forgive me for asking a basic question, if it is one. Assuming these observations are indeed correct, does this make any part of the idea of an electric sun more plausible than the current model of the sun? If string theory seems more like physics than magic, then why is even the direction of the idea toward an electric sun absurd?

For centuries, people have assumed that the sun is nothing more than a big campfire in the sky. When scientists learned more about chemistry and the energies involved, they realized that the energy output is far too large to be supported by any chemical process known. Just at the time when that realization hit, humanity discovered atomic energy. So the natural assumption was that the energy source of the sun was the atom. Subsequent observations of the sun, including this latest one contradict the theory th

The fact that the corona is much hotter contradicts well-known facts of thermodynamics. Sunspots are dark because they are holes in the solar atmosphere allowing the cooler solar interior to be seen through them.

A fun thermodynamical fact: if you surround a cold object with an envelope of hot gas, that object will heat to the same temperature as the gas. So it's not like the EU explains this either.

You and mainstream scientists keep talking about gas. The solar corona and atmosphere do not consist of gas as we usually think of it, but of electrically conducting plasmas. Such a plasma is a much better conductor of electricity than any metal. The laws of physics that apply to gas, such as Boyles law and other gas laws to not apply in any way. As the galactic electrical current flows toward the sun and away from it, it first has to flow through the corona, which as you say is much less dense than the sol

Here we are not talking about a gas. The corona is an extremely hot plasma, heated by an electric current on its way to the solar atmosphere. Only a small fraction of the energy carried by the galactic electric current is dissipated in the Corona, but is nevertheless sufficient to produce incredibly high temperatures therein. Most of the electrical energy is dissipated in the form of electric arcs similar to lightning or a welder's torch.

The fusion reaction supposedly happening in the interior of the Sun produces copious amounts of neutrinos. However, the number of neutrinos that should be measured here on earth from the sun are far below what we should see if the fusion model were correct.

Looks trollish to me but I do want to address this particular falsehood about solar neutrinos.

The solar neutrino problem was a major discrepancy between measurements of the numbers of neutrinos flowing through the Earth and theoretical models of the solar interior, lasting from the mid-1960s to about 2002. The discrepancy has since been resolved by new understanding of neutrino physics, requiring a modification of the Standard Model of particle physics – specifically, neutrino oscillation. Essentially, as neutrinos have mass, they can change from the type that had been expected to be produced in the Sun's interior into two types that would not be caught by the detectors in use at the time.

The iron filings experiment is the where that whole idea of “lines” of magnetic fields comes from. It is a convenient way of describing the intensity and direction of the magnetic field, but the lines themselves do not exist. Weather maps are often depicted with isobar lines, showing the locations of equal pressure in the atmosphere. There are no such lines in the atmosphere of course. Such isobar lines do not break or reconnect, neither do magnetic “lines”. Any explanation that requ

A couple of reasons, one of which is that the electric sun people can't even come up with an even vaguely coherent hypothesis for how their supposed electric circuit is supposed to work, and it explains almost none of the observed solar phenomena. The enormous quantity of electrons that are supposed to be streaming in from the interstellar gas (because they think that the interstellar gas heats the sun, not gravitationally-induced heating and hydrogen fusion) should be easily observable, in fact they shoul

The EU "Electric Sun" makes no testable predictions. When asking EU 'theorists' about the value of the magnetic field around the Sun according to their Z-pinch model, and how it is calculated, so we can compare to spacecraft measurements, we get no answer. Attempts to build a model based on their descriptions generate values that are factors of thousands to millions of times larger than the measurments.
That is not a characteristic of a working theory.
If we ask about the particle energy and flux of par

This is simply not true. There is in fact a very specific prediction for the Birkeland solar model listed at
http://www.thesurfaceofthesun.com/blog.htm [thesurfaceofthesun.com]
Since it's one of the few models that predicts a mass separated atmosphere, there is a specific prediction related to Neon +4 output from the sun, and the prediction that it originates in the photosphere not the coronal loops. As usual, you're claims about it's predictive capacity are simply false.

2) The standard of science is the numerical results of the mathematical models must match the observations. If you claim the 'Birkeland' model works better than the standard model, then you must meet that standard.
Where are the numerical results from the model you advocate? Can you tell me the proton and electron density and energy or magnetic field at Earth's

What I would like to know is how this change in measured convection rate affects our models of solar lifecycles. Granted, this may be a methodology error; IANAP (anymore), so I can't answer that question, but it seems to me some important new questions arise as a result of this finding. Does this mean stars age slower than we thought, or faster - or is the rate unchanged? Is the overall heat transfer is slower, is some other known mechanism transferring more heat, or is there some unknown transfer mechanism we have yet to discover? There's a lot of work for some lucky grad students out there.

I've been fascinated with the thunderbolts.info site for quite a while. They haven't yet convinced me that we need to throw out our conventional understanding of the universe, but they have some extremely fascinating theories, and I'm disappointed that I haven't seen any serious responses to their theories.

I too remain open and skeptical of BOTH the unproven established theories and the unproven alternatives. One thing that really made me consider the electric theories is pulsar rotations. I find it much easier to conceive of a fast rotating electric field causing the periodicity than super fast spinning hyper dense matter.

They don't read like crackpots to me. Name-calling alternative perspectives is something more indicative of religion than science;p Also, this is the interwebz; there are actual crackpots in abundance.

From their site:

"... theories tend to harden into ‘facts,’ even in the face of mountingcontradictions. Astronomer Carl Sagan’s Cosmos was published aquarter-century ago. At that time, some questions were still permitted.On the issue of redshift, Sagan wrote: “There is nevertheless an

That the shapes and spins of galaxies can be shown in simulation by collapsing parallel electric filaments ("pinch" effect), p. 26.. In contrast, from what I understand, you have to introduce a majority of dark matter & energy into such a simulation to get a stable galaxy if the stars interact otherwise with only gravity.

"That the shapes and spins of galaxies can be shown in simulation by collapsing parallel electric filaments ("pinch" effect), "

No, your source is lying.

In 1986, Peratt published two Plasma Cosmology (NOT Electric Universe) papers, reporting the results of some simulations (similar to, but not quite the same as, what you wrote). However, these were not simulations of real galaxies. Why not? Because real galaxies contain stars (duh!), whose motions ("spins", to use your term) cannot possibly be represente

Hm, I think you're missing my point... I wasn't supporting their claims as more correct than a gravitationally-based cosmology, just noting that they seemed to be making reasonable conjectures, albeit non-mainstream, and that they didn't deserve to be called names. I said:

"That seems reasonable; correct or not is a matter to be determined."

The same can be said about dark energy/matter. Reasonable, but correctness TBD. It is problematic for a simulation to not model all know behaviors of a

You seemed pretty clear, when you claimed "They're overall arguing that electrodynamics can better explain many astronomical observations than gravitation + dark matter, dark energy and modifications to cosmological constants", where "they" refers to what's found on a particular website (actually, PDF), that you linked to. My point: there's no substance to any such claims (other than those which merely repeat what you can easily find from any mainstream source).